FLOWERS OF EVIL—Charles Baudelaire; translated by George Dillon and Edna St. Vincent Millay—Harper ($2.75).
Translations are tricky and most poets, at least, would say that poetry is untranslatable. Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), whom the late Lytton Strachey called “the Swift of poetry,” and who is still the most widely read poet in France, was a well-to-do bourgeois who despised his class, lived most of his life with a mulatto mistress, took opium and scandalized even Paris with his Fleurs du Mal, which combined polish, putrescence and pornography to an inspired degree. Since his death he has been manhandled by many a translator. Last week the latest attempt to transplant his hot-house Flowers of Evil was put on exhibition in the U. S. This time it was the work of two pairs of hands: Pulitzer Prize Poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and George Dillon. Both French and U. S. critics sent flowery congratulations, seemed to feel that at last Baudelaire had been well & truly turned into English.
In her preface Poet Millay explains the collaboration. George Dillon, who started the job by himself, sent her several samples of his version; her enthusiasm was so quickly fired that she wanted to lend a hand. Four months later the job was done. Of the 72 poems (about half of Baudelaire’s published poetry), 36 were translated by Poet Millay, 35 by Dillon. One they did together. They omitted only one (Femmes Damnées) of the six poems that seemed scabrous to the Paris police of 1857. Though she admits that some of their versions are not so much translations as adaptations, Poet Millay says that in every instance they have used the original metre and form, invites comparison by printing Baudelaire’s version on the opposite page. In some cases she thinks they have been able to give the literal equivalent. Some might think it queer that so ladylike a poet as Edna St. Vincent Millay should spend four months with such a tortured satanist as Charles Baudelaire. With a stamp of her foot she defies the lifted eyebrows: “It is impossible to make a good translation of a poet of whom one disapproves.”
Dillon sample:
Like angels with bright savage eyes
I will come treading phantom-wise
Hither where thou art wont to sleep,
Amid the shadows hollow and deep.
And I will give thee, my dark one,
Kisses as icy as the moon,
Caresses as of snakes that crawl
In circles round a cistern’s wall.
When morning shows its livid face
There will be no-one in my place,
And a strange cold will settle here.
Others, not knowing what thou art,
May think to reign upon thy heart
With tenderness: I trust to fear.
Millay sample:
It seems to me sometimes my blood is
bubbling out
As fountains do, in rhythmic sobs; I
feel it spout
And lapse; I hear it plainly; it makes,
a murmuring sound;
But from what wound it wells, so far I
have not found.
As blood runs in the lists, round tumbled armoured bones,
It soaks the city, islanding the paving-stones;
Everything thirsty leans to lap it, with stretched head;
Trees suck it up; it stains their trunks and branches red.
I turn to wine for respite. I drink, and
I drink deep;
(Just for one day, one day, neither to
see nor hear!)
Wine only renders sharper the frantic
eye and ear.
In terror I cry to love, “Oh, put my
mind to sleep!”
But love for me is only a mattress where
I shrink
On needles, and my blood is given to
whores to drink.
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